Let the More Loving One Be Me: My Journey from Trauma to Freedom

I am content. Happy, even.

This was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, it was pretty unlikely, given the family I grew up in. 

I grew up in danger. In danger because of a sexually abusive, alcoholic, and rageful father. And in danger because of a mother who was terrified of feelings—her angry husband’s, certainly; her own, presumably; and mine, because of how utterly family-destroying it would have been to have a little child speak the truth of how terrifying the family really was.

My father was a large man, and not just physically. He was a vice president of one of America’s largest corporations, a larger- than -life figure to most adults and certainly to me as young child. 

He was physically imposing, a good six feet, massive, though neither obese nor muscular. He had enormous, straggly eyebrows and a large bald head. His voice was stentorian. In adulthood, he sang bass, loudly, in the church choir. In college, he dabbled in stage acting. I have little doubt that his voice could carry to the farthest balcony; it certainly dominated the dining room table.

My father was not a handsome man. It was difficult to look at his face because his eyes were cold, and small, compared to the rest of him. His body radiated tension with every gesture, every word. An irritable, anxious man, he was a caged tiger, ready to pounce. My being slow to bring him after-dinner tea would trigger a growl. My brother slumping in his chair would occasion a sharp reprimand. Even scrambled eggs drew his ire if they didn’t clump up on time. 

A Trumpian figure, he was narcissistic and authoritarian, easily wounded, physically awkward, chronically angry. He cried as easily as he raged, especially after his wine at dinner, and I could never figure out how to handle either the tears or the rage. To a psychiatrist, he would have been called a “depressed alcoholic.” To us, he was simply, “terrifying.” 

He was the only important one in the family. The rest of us tiptoed around him. No one else’s feelings or needs mattered, or could even be spoken aloud. At his insistence, we had regular, dreadful “family meetings,” where he was the only one who could speak with impunity. He ran these tense sessions like the corporate executive he was, never seeming to get the difference between work and family. 

My brother and I were not allowed to call him “Dad.” We knew he was our real father, not some step-father. But we had to address him by his first name. He mocked me when, as a teenager, I begged to call him “Dad.” 

As I have written in my forthcoming book, “Let the More Loving One be Me, “ from She Writes Press, my father was sexually abusive, standing, threateningly, in my doorway wearing only a T-shirt every night of my adolescence. I was terrified, frozen, never knowing whether this would be the night he came all the way into my room and raped me. He never touched me. Sexually. But the constant threat, like a mock execution, was trauma enough.

And, of course, my experience is hardly unique. Which is why women, perhaps especially writers with the ability to communicate difficult things, have such valuable voices.

I didn’t coin the term “speak truth to power,” but I try to live by it, as a woman and as a journalist.

I am so fortunate to have stumbled into journalism as a career, being paid to speak truth to power, paid to dig deep to find the truth, or really, truths.

On the wall in my study hangs a framed cover of the New Yorker from January 19, 2015. 

The picture shows the magnificent Eiffel Tower in Paris, surrounded, at the bottom, by fiery red foliage. The upper part of the image shows, instead of the real, graceful tower itself, a long, sharpened pencil, a symbol of the power of the press and a monument to the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo. 

Twelve days earlier, two French Muslim brothers, members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, had barged into the magazine’s offices, killed 12 people and injured 11 others, in protest against the magazine, which had run cartoons mocking the Islamic prophet Muhammad. (The magazine had also lampooned Catholicism and Judaism.)

Somehow, the surviving staff members of Charlie Hebdo managed to keep going. The next issue featured a cover cartoon of a Muslim prophet holding a sign that read “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie,” an emphatic affirmation of freedom of the press.) The print run was almost 8 million copies in six languages, compared to its usual run of 60,000, only in French. A much-needed victory for the free press.

On the bookshelf in my study is one of the most important books I have ever read, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” by the late Anthony Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times. 

Lewis’ title comes directly from the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In an opinion he wrote in 1929, Holmes wrote that a constitutional imperative is the “principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”  

Amen. 

In troubled times like these – have there ever been untroubled times? – we need to speak the truth as women, as Americans, and as citizens of this threatened planet.

More power to us!

—

Let the More Loving One Be Me: My Journey from Trauma to Freedom

In this compelling tale, Judy Foreman reveals the terror she felt every night as a girl as she lay in bed frozen in dread, listening for her father’s footsteps coming down the hall.

She recalls his mostly naked body, his stale smell, his silhouette in the bedroom doorway. Worse, in some ways, was her mother’s denial—her insistence that this man was wonderful, her refusal to acknowledge his drinking or his rage. It wasn’t until Foreman spent a high school summer as an exchange student with a Danish family that she began to see how unsafe her own family was; it wasn’t until she went to an all-women’s college that she realized that women had value.

Ultimately, this book shows that with time and therapy, it is possible to heal from serious childhood trauma and lead a life of deep fulfillment, rewarding work and, most wonderfully, love. It is a book about the power of emotional courage to change one’s own inner and outer experience of the world, and about what matters most in life: cultivating healthy connections to other people.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers